Stephen Hawking Could Win the Nobel Prize As the 'Black holes' Created in a LAB Confirm Stephen Hawking's Radiation Theory

4/27/2016

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About 42 years ago, Stephen Hawking proposed that not
everything that comes near the black hole succumbs to its deep nothingness. Small
particles of light (photons) are occasionally emitted back out, depriving the
black hole of a tiny amount of energy, and this steady loss of mass over time
means every black hole ultimately evaporates out of existence. Labelled as
Hawking radiation, these evading particles help us make sense of one of the utmost
paradoxes in the known Universe, but nobody got to prove this practically, and
Hawking’s suggestion stayed firmly in hypothesis territory.

But now all that is possibly be about to change, with
two independent teams of scientists claiming that they’ve found proof to back
up Hawking's claims, and it could finally see one of the greatest living
physicists win a Nobel Prize. Back in 1974, Hawking suggested that the Universe
is jam-packed with 'virtual particles' that, according to what we know about
how quantum mechanics works, blink in and out of existence and destroy each
other when they come in contact - with the one exception, if they come to
appear on either side of a black hole's event horizon.

Fundamentally, one particle gets eaten by the black
hole, and the other radiates away into the cosmos.

The presence of Hawking radiation has explained a lot
of questions about how black holes really work, but during that, it also raised
a bunch of question that physicists are still trying to resolve.

Hawking’s theory wasn’t proved earlier because this
radiation emitted by the black hole is so subtle, it’s almost impossible to spot
it from thousands of light-years away.

But now physicist Jeff Steinhauer from Technion
University in Haifa, Israel, thinks that if we can’t reach black holes then why
not drag out the black hole to us?

As Oliver Moody reports for The Times, Steinhauer has achieved
to create a lab-sized ‘black hole’ assembled from sound, and when he kicked it
into gear, he observed particles take energy from its outer edge.

Reporting his experiment in a research paper forwarded
to the physics pre-press website, arXiv.org, Steinhauer says he chilled helium
to just above absolute zero, then churned it up so fast, it made a 'barrier' over
which sound should not be able to pass.

Moody reports, “Steinhauer said he had found signs that
phonons, the very small packets of energy that make up sound waves, were
leaking out of his sonic black hole just as Hawking’s equations predict they
should”

These results of the experiment are still under
peer-review and the research paper has uploaded on arXiv.org for public to see.

According to a another paper published in Physical Review Letters just last month, Physicists Chris Adami and Kamil Bradler from
the University of Ottawa propose a new method that lets physicists to follow a
black hole’s life over time.

That’s thrilling stuff, because it means that whatsoever
information or matter that travels over the event horizon doesn’t ‘vanish’ but
is gradually leaking back out during the later phases of the black hole’s disappearance.

Adami said in a press release "To perform this
calculation, we had to guess how a black hole interacts with the Hawking radiation
field that surrounds it. This is because there currently is no theory of
quantum gravity that could suggest such an interaction. However, it appears we
made a well-educated guess because our model is equivalent to Hawking’s theory
in the limit of fixed, unchanging black holes."

Both the researches will soon come with an answer
whether hawking is right or wrong. As Moody points out, Peter Higgs, who claimed the presence of the Higgs boson, had to wait some 49 years for his Nobel Prize,
we’ll have to patient if Hawking ends up with his own.

This
blog is managed by Umer Abrar. To contact the editor, write to mirzavadoodulbaig@gmail.com
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